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Monday, June 16, 2014

"Review": Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia "by" Kendall and Kylie Jenner

Review:Krap: Krappy of Krap: The Krap of Krap and Krapia by Kendall and Kylie JennerGoodreadsRelease date: The ApocalypsePublisher: SatanSeries: I don't even want to answer thisSource: Hell's minionsLength: InterminableRating:

Kendall and Kylie
Jenner, stars on the hit reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians,
present their debut novel—a thrilling dystopian story about two
super-powered girls who embark on a journey together.

Two cities… Two girls… A shared destiny…

In
a world of the far future, the great city of Indra has two faces: a
beautiful paradise floating high in the sky, and a nightmare world of
poverty carved into tunnels beneath the surface of the earth.

Kendall
and Kylie Jenner, the youngest sisters in the Kardashian dynasty, have
written a gripping tale of air, fire, and a bond of blood

Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia: Written by Kendall and Kylie: But Not Really: But Not At All

(Kendall and Kylie Jenner, dressed in artfully tattered jeans, artfully tattered t-shirts, and artfully tattered souls, lounge in their third bedroom. Kylie thumbs though a magazine, trying to find pictures of herself. Kendall lowers her Prada sunglasses and sighs a sigh of deepest existential ennui.)

Kendall: I'm, like, soooooo bored.

Kylie: OMK, like, me too.

Kendall: We should, like, do something. You know? Like with our lives.Kylie: (points at a picture on the page) Look, me! Wait, that's you. Or is it Kourtney?

Kendall: I'm being super serious, Kylie.

Kylie: Wanna go to Kankun?

Kendall: We went to Kankun last week, duh. Besides, Kankun is soooo lower klass these days. And I want to do something meaningful. Like... life change-worthy. Like...that changes lives.

Kylie: Hey, it's me! Oh wait, no. That's J. Law. Klose enough.

Kendall: OHMYKANYE THAT'S IT.

Kylie: What?

Kendall: Books! Books are so fetch nowadays.

Kylie: That J. Law is so hot right now.

Kendall: SO LET'S WRITE ONE.

Kylie: Write, like...with words?

Kendall: EW. NO. GROSS. WITH MONEY, OF KOURSE.

Kylie: Oh, thank GOD.Kendall: But, like, we have to make sure it's just like all the things people already like. Like there has to be a... a... a what do you kall it? Government! Yeah! And it's bad. But like there's this girl. NO! TWO GIRLS! JUST LIKE US!

Kylie: But less hot.

Kendall: Wayyyyy less hot.

Kylie: But we have to make sure we're, like, super serious about this, and in no way at all will this book be any fun at all at all.

Kendall: RIGHT. Because then mean old poopie heads who are way less hot than we are will make fun of us on the internet. So, like, everything has to be really komplicated but like futuristic because that is soooooo hot right now.

Kylie: Shailene WISHES she could star in our book.

Kylie: And she is SO not invited to the launch party.

I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I'm sure Kendall and Kylie are perfectly lovely and well-behaved teenage millionaires, blah di blah di blah, BUT THIS BOOK BROKE MY BRAIN. I have a very high threshold for krap (exhibits A, B, C, D, E, and all the way to Z). I am even that girl that takes some sort of strange, vicious pleasure in reading and watching terrible things. I have legitimately terrible taste in movies sometimes, and I am a masochist. So when an ARC of Kendall and Kylie Jenner's ghostwritten YA dystopian debut fell into my hands, I kackled with glee. No way was I going to pass this up. This was bound to be Modelland-levels of lunacy and fun.

WRONG. SO WRONG. ALL THE WRONG.

I have a migraine from this book. This dense, flat, empy, serious, dismal "book". I feel so sad for the poor writer forced to kobble together the shitstorm of dystopian tropes (dystropians?) Kendall and Kylie, the lesser Kardashian life forms, flung at her. I feel sorry for Kendall and Kylie, being shilled out for money all the freaking time. I feel sorry for my eyeballs, for being subjected to the rotten fruit of their not-so-kreative labor.

Patsy: Like herpes. Each one with it's own reality show. They're multiplying like head lice.

Eddie: Oh, and look at this fat one at the end. Very soon, she will split like an amoeba and become two Kardashians.

Patsy: That looks like a boob. In fact it's just another Kardashian.

Kruel? Probably. But this book. This Kanye-forsaken book. It's about a rich girl who lives in a city in the sky (?) and a poor girl who lives in an orphanage where they routinely feed people to underground mutants (?!). The rich girl does not want to attend her Emergence Ball, which has nothing to do with an Emergency Kanye Dance Party, sadly, but does make me want to kill myself, because every single Term of Worldbuilding Significance is Kapitalized. We are gifted with such glorious kharacter names as Etiquette Tutor, Andru, and my personal favorite, Waslo Souture.

No, seriously, every single element of every single sci-fi book you've ever read is here. It's absolutely horrifying to keep straight. It's almost like a game, really, seeing how many things can be shoved in here until the poor book just gives up and sags to the floor and dies.

This book wasn't fun. Not even in a, "Oh em gee, Kendall and Kylie are so hilariously terrible at this words-putting-into-sentence-doing, and it's hilarious!" way. It was just sheer, dense misery. It was like chewing through a hunk of wood. The first fifteen damn pages are this Livia girl galloping on a horse THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD and infodumping to us, and oh, what a mess of a world it is. I'll do you a favor and won't try to explain it here, because honestly. And then the next twenty pages are Lex thinking about her entire personal history and infodumping even more nonsense on us, and it's all so boring. The tears. The tears, you guys. And how horrifically derivative it all is! It steals worldbuiling elements from The Matrix and Kastle in the Sky and The Archived and, well, basically everything with words in it.

(Seriously, this poor ghostwriter. I hope you were fully kompensated.) (But then again, you were responsible for the atrocious sentences to follow, and my eyeballs were forced to read those sentences, so maybe not)

Still think I'm being too harsh? Well, decide for yourself. All kuotes come from an advance, uncorrected proof:

His hope was foolish. He could show them only through action that testing his might was immensely foolish.

I raise my eyebrows, noting her abilities in Conversational Intercourse are limited as well.

But doesn't she see the respect with which I hold my zinger? With every slash it barks.

My mouth is impossibly bitter, so I spit again, and with it comes rushing too much anger.

I'm the only one who remembers them. And yet, I have no memories of them.

Most refer to [my horse] Veda as white, but they're mistaken. Veda is ivory. And that is altogether different.

Well that's a horse of a different color!

The ones that lurk beneath the earth, that are cloaked in shadows and hidden within the eaves of the cavernous mantle.

"Once we found each other, I always looked out for her down here, and now she is gone, gone forever."

Twice
a year the mutations take orphans, gifted to continue our sanctuary
here in the bowels of the earth. At the point where the City of Indra
doesn't care what goes on--we are that far beneath. There are greater worries.

Behold Indra: city of impossible architecture, her beauty timeless, her secrets dark. Whose mind dreamed her to life?

31 comments:

This might be my most favorite of things that you have ever posted on the internet. Although I feel like I lost brain cells just reading those quotes. I want to hug you and give you cupcakes just for putting yourself through this (although I'm kind of concerned for your sanity now).

Oh my gosh I freaking love this review trollololololol. The character names though - Waslo Souture - I seriously laughed out loud in the middle of my office. Whoooooops. I regret nothing. I can't believe they published this. Seriously. I mean I guess I understand the publisher is like - the names, guaranteed money. But still, even the ghostwriter had to be like, hey, I can make it the most cliché thing from here to Tokyo - but I can also make it not sound ridiculously stupid. Clichés can be okay if they're well written, but here they just didn't even try? Those quotes are seriously HORRIFIC.

But thank you for your kind sacrifice for my amusement of this review xD

io9, the Gawker site dedicated to SFF, put up an article about this and I linked it on my Facebook by just saying "That's it...I quit." Books like this not only give ammo to the YA critics, but pushes out 20-40 writers like me that give a crap about the craft...it's just crushing.

This is one of the best reviews I've ever read! I saw the two girls interviewing on the Tonight Show and I performed a five minute rant for my family about the writers who spend years developing their skill and how Kendal and Kylie just think they can hop right in and take advantage of the Young Adult market and I just... nothing is right about this picture. Congratulations on getting through it. You deserve an award. (The cover is gorgeous though, isn't it? I mean, it's a total rip-off of the new Shatter Me covers, but still. It's a pity the words inside are so mind-numbing.)

Thank you for suffering through this book in order to give us this laugh today. Because a laugh it was. Well, until you got to the kuotes... then my face was just set in a permanent cringe. Either way, thank you martyr Gillian.

I just died a little bit. I'm glad that you read this so that I don't have to. Not that I wanted to, but I'm grateful anyway because you made me laugh so hard. Also, I was fully expecting them to spell everything the Kardashian way. Alas that they did not take advantage even more.

This is seriously my favorite review in the history of reviews. I hoped someone would take one for the team and read this trainwreck, and thank you, thank you so much for allowing us to be spared. Some of the kuotes didn't even seem like English. Like perhaps they found someone who worked for a product helpline in some other country, and just told her to go for it? Whoever published this must really hate books, and readers, and humanity as a whole.

I was about two pages in and started wondering "Is it just me, or is this complete shit?" So I decided I'd take to the internet to see some other opinions. This review just saved me an hour of mind numbing, so-called "literature".

I read the 2 free chapters online and I could barely pay attention. I don't know how to explain it, it was just too stuffy and flowery for its own good, and just for the sake of being stuffy and flowery. and seems like it was just put there to make the Jenners seem smart. As for the second chapter, 2 words, HYPER CRIB! Bwahaha!! there's just no coming back from that line

Oh my God, you are amazing. Thank you so much for a gut-busting review and for almost giving yourself a brain aneurysm from reading it.

I'm absolutely positive that the ghost writer had a bone to pick with the Jenner sisters and this was her/his perfect plan to exact what (s)he felt was divine justice. Otherwise I would assume that they picked a passerby on the street at random who looked relatively creative and then paid said person a large sum of money to clack out crap on a laptop.

The quotes that you picked out were absolute perfection in showcasing the absolute horror that this book is and I must admit: I have never been so tempted to read a book that would no doubt put at least half of my brain into severe shock and force the other half into playing dead just to salvage what little is left of it.

Once again, thank you so much for an incredible review and I am definitely bookmarking this blog.

I BOW to your stamina, your willpower, your wonderful, witty writing skills and your willingness to take one for the team...meaning the Universe minus the Kardashitties. And I agree with the posts above, written by REAL writers who will probably never be given the chance to be published because these two (and their greedy Momager) felt they didn't have enough money already...at the ripe ole' age of 20? It's beyond appalling; it's one thing to want to write something and test one's skills, but quite another to supposedly hire a ghostwriter (who obvously dropped a shit-load of acid before taking to the computer keys...wtf is with all those horrendous unintelligible kuotes? Seriously...I had to read each one at least 3 times to try and understand wth she was trying to say. Congrats on surviving and I truly hope your eyeballs have stopped bleeding from reading this krap.

This is a really REALLY old post, but recently there was this news article about the Jenners writing a second book and I wanted to see the first.

I'm just gonna say that I'm glad I just downloaded a PDF of that krap, because it wasn't worth my money.

I mean, sure, I've written stuff that's dense and flowery too in the recent past, but I never published them anywhere, much less sold them for 17-ass dollars. AND THE NAMES. Oh, dear lord Waslo Souture had the best name ever not gonna lie XD.

Let me just say that YA Dystopian novels aren't my thing, because most of the time it's just YA Romance mixed in a dystopian world, or a bunch of unnecessarily capitalized words (Proper Young Woman, really?) AND THIS BOOK SHOWED ME THAT THERE WERE OTHER WAYS OF MAKING YA DYSTOPIAN SUCK.

And the fact that it took four people (the Jenners + 2 ghostwriters) to make 300+ pages of shopworn krap just makes it suck more.

I'm waiting for the second book's release in November, even if it's probably just gonna be ghostwritten krap again. And I'm also just gonna rip it off the internet, since I have other things to do with $17.

All that stuff aside, this blog is awesome. GIFs were on point, and KANYE-FORSAKEN OH MY BEJEEZUS.